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Image via Wikipedia( Looks pretty young and fit for a dying man needing constant medical attention for dialysis the last he was known in U.S. social circles )
The Quagmire War - (the lamp is lit) - and rallies and other matters
Stay tuned for an informational note regarding Stewart-Colbert satellite rallies in many cities (either for Sanity or for Rage!)...but first... to the Vietnam of our era...
George Friedman, the principal of STRATFOR, a major international strategic consulting firm, has been meticulously dissecting the reasons for - and future prospects of - our nine year quagmire in Afghanistan. Here he gets to a point I have been talking about for years:
"While acts of transnational terrorism target civilians, they are not attacks — have not been and are not evolving into attacks — that endanger the territorial integrity of the United States or the way of life of the American people. They are dangerous and must be defended against, but transnational terrorism is and remains a tactical problem that for nearly a decade has been treated as if it were the pre-eminent strategic threat to the United States....
"Nietzsche wrote that, “The most fundamental form of human stupidity is forgetting what we were trying to do in the first place.” The stated U.S. goal in Afghanistan was the destruction of al Qaeda. While al Qaeda as it existed in 2001 has certainly been disrupted and degraded, al Qaeda’s evolution and migration means that disrupting and degrading it — to say nothing of destroying it — can no longer be achieved by waging a war in Afghanistan....
"As al Qaeda has fled Afghanistan, the overall political goal for the United States in the country has evolved to include the creation of a democratic and uncorrupt Afghanistan. It is not clear that anyone knows how to do this, particularly given that most Afghans consider the ruling government of President Hamid Karzai — with which the United States is allied — as the heart of the corruption problem, and beyond Kabul most Afghans do not regard their way of making political and social arrangements to be corrupt."
I would go much farther than George. Because I have no doubt that the principal goal that Osama bin Laden had in mind, in perpetrating the crimes of 9/11, was to lure America into an extended, interminable quagmire of attrition in the "land where empires go to die." While this may seem a bold statement that cannot be proved, it is consistent with three major facts:
1) American had to react. It was predictable where we would have to strike.
2) Osama's salad days were spent humbling one superpower in the same mountains.
3) If you were a foe of the United States, you would study which past errors almost destroyed America. Those two were Civil War and a land war of attrition in Asia. (In fact, since 9/11, it appears we've been rapidly plunged into both.)
( Not only was that an Orwellian concept used also by the British Empire. the U.S. replaced French Colonialism in taking over a civil war...again. Korea is the most notable predecessor, perhaps...still unresolved. )
=== The Faux Equivalence ===
One of the tricks mastered by the Murdochs (envision the Morlochs of HG Wells's The Time Machine!) is to create an impression of false equivalence. We are seeing this here in California. Every time GOP gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman is accused of favoring never-ending tax largesse for the uber-rich, she responds by calling her opponent, former governor Jerry Brown, of being in the clutches of Big Unions.
It frustrates me that she is never given the ultimate rebuttal. "Even if this is true, the unions have been plummetting in power, for decades, while the super-rich have been skyrocketing. So which should we fear?" What social force, in fact, did nearly ALL of our ancestors fear? What group ever came close to oppressing liberty, open competition, social mobility or free markets, more than oligarchy? Whether they called themselves feudal lords or commie nomenklatura, or captains of the crony-CEO caste?
We older folk grew up in an America with the flattest social strata (for white males) in the history of the world, yet that did not prevent a vibrant capitalism! In contrast, over the last two decades, the fraction of the total national income going to the top 1% doubled; the fraction going to the top one tenth of a percent tripled; the fraction going to the top 1% of 1% quadrupled - and capitalism is floundering. Can anybody parse cause and effect here?
Do the Murdochs actually believe they can prevent the chivvied and harassed and cornered middle class from noticing this trend... forever? How about when this disparity doubles? And doubles again? And again? Is there a limit where the oligarchs will conceivably say "enough"? Any limit at all?
History doubts it. Insatiable oligarchies are unable to stop, even in their own long term self-interest. But don't take my word for it. Pick a random decade and continent. Try reading history.
With the exception of Mitt Romney, Fox now employs every major potential Republican presidential candidate not currently in elected office. With Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee all making moves indicating they may run for president, their common employer is facing a question that hasn’t been asked before: How does a news organization cover White House hopefuls when so many are on the payroll?
I believe the most powerful act of social politics that could take place, today, would be to scientifically verify and publicize the fact that self-righteous indignation is as powerful a self-doped addictive state as gambling, thrill-seeking or rage. And much of our culture war would start to dissipate, if the indignantly outraged were viewed the way we do the pitiable (and contemptible) people who wallow in heroin and cocaine.
THIS is what Obama should be saying, right now. It should be shouted at Jon Stewart's rally. And I would be happy to do so, in tones of ringing (if ironic) righteousness.
...a collaborative contrarian product of http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/ (site feed URL: http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/atom.xml)
Where Your Taxes Really Go (+)by: Yellow DogSun Oct 03, 2010 at 07:17:27 AM CDT |
| There's a lot of discussion about how politically useful it would be for taxpayers to actually receive a receipt like this, showing exactly how much of each person's taxes paid for which part of the federal budget. Regardless of how the parties try to spin it, putting this kind of concrete, specific information into the hands of taxpayers would be an unalloyed good thing for small-d democracy. No more blowhards in bars claiming that half the federal budget goes for foreign aid or that food stamps cost more than the Pentagon. Pull the facts out of your wallet. David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo: Via Ezra, here's a sample of what the taxes of someone making $34,140 a year go to pay for:  All Things Pakistan How Large is Pakistan’s Great Flood?Adil Najam It is difficult, even for Pakistanis, to fully comprehend the scale and size of Pakistan’s great flood. We can all imagine what a home, a locality, maybe even a city, looks like when submerged. But it is difficult for most people – especially those outside Pakistan – to imagine just how great is the ‘great’ in Pakistan’s great flood. Here are some pictures – created from the BBC’s Dimensions website – that might help you comprehend the incomprehensible.     The first map is of the United States and shows that the area of Pakistan’s 2010 floods would stretch nearly the entire United States from upstate Florida to the Canadian border with upstate New York. The next two maps place the area affected by the Pakistan’s floods on the map of mainland Europe – From Denmark down to Spain. The final map overlays the same on a map of Japan. The maps speak for themselves. As do the numbers. What can I add to this that I have not already? |
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